Public gathering sponsored byThe Center for Public Intellectuals& The University of Illinois-Chicago

April 19th-20th, 2002 Chicago Illini Union 828 S. Wolcott

This conference is part of the Center's mission of helping to create a more engaged civil society, working towards social change, fostering coalitions between theorists and activists, and combating anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture. It will be both a celebration of ideas and a rigorous examination of the roles and responsibilities that intellectuals play in society.

I. Why Do Ideas Matter? (a keynote panel)

We introduce the meta theme of the conference by hearing success stories from diverse voices discussing their experiences intervening intellectually.

Obama was a director of the Woods Fund board from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the Fund's website.

Obama served on the board with Ayers, who was a Weathermen leader and has written about his involvement with the group's bombings of the New York City Police headquarters in 1970, the Capitol in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972.

"I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough," Ayers told the New York Times in an interview released on Sept. 11, 2001

"Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon," Ayers wrote in his memoirs, titled "Fugitive Days." He continued with a disclaimer that he didn't personally set the bombs, but his group set the explosives and planned the attack.

A $200 campaign contribution is listed on April 2, 2001 by the "Friends of Barack Obama" campaign fund. The two appeared speaking together at several public events, including a 1997 University of Chicago panel entitled, "Should a child ever be called a 'super predator?'" and another panel for the University of Illinois in April 2002, entitled, "Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?"

The charges against Ayers were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.

Ayers is married to another notorious Weathermen terrorist, Bernadine Dohrn, who has also served on panels with Obama. Dohrn was once on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted List and was described by J. Edgar Hoover as the "most dangerous woman in America." Ayers and Dohrn raised the son of Weathermen terrorist Kathy Boudin, who was serving a sentence for participating in a 1981 murder and robbery that left 4 people dead [Brinks truck robbery--see below for a few details].

The following telling excerpts are from the actual New York Times interview William (Bill) Ayers did in 2001. Despite the fact that Hannity, Limbaugh, and all the other popular conservative talking heads, refer to the Weather Underground as merely "domestic terrorists", they were in fact communist revolutionaries. The Times article was ironically published on Sept 11, 2001:

"During his fugitive years, Mr. Ayers said, he lived in 15 states, taking names of dead babies in cemeteries who were born in the same year as he. He describes the typical safe house: there were usually books by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara's picture in the bedroom; fermented Vietnamese fish sauce in the refrigerator, and live sourdough starter donated by a Native American that was reputed to have passed from hand to hand over a century."

(snip)

"Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as:

'Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

And he says he doesn't actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but 'it's been quoted so many times I'm beginning to think I did,' he said."

(snip)

"He also writes about the Weathermen's sexual experimentation as they tried to 'smash monogamy.' The Weathermen were 'an army of lovers,' he says, and describes having had different sexual partners, including his best male friend."

"In July 1969, Dohrn, Eleanor Raskin, Dianne Donghi, Peter Clapp, David Millstone and Diana Oughton,... all representing "Weatherman", as Dohrn's faction was now called, traveled to Cuba and met with representatives of the North Vietnamese and Cuban governments."-wikipedia:Bernardine_Dohrn

Allies in War By David Horowitz FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, September 17, 2001:

ON THE MORNING OF THE ATTACKS on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, along with a million other readers of the New York Times including many who would never be able to read the paper again, I opened its pages to be confronted by a color photo showing a middle-aged couple holding hands and affecting a defiant look at the camera. The article was headlined in an irony that could not have been more poignant, "No Regrets For A Love Of Explosives."

The couple pictured were Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former leaders of the 1960s Weather Underground, Americas first terrorist cult. One of their bombing targets, as it happened, was the Pentagon.

"I dont regret setting bombs," Ayers was quoted in the opening line of the Times profile; "I feel we didnt do enough." In 1969, Ayers and his wife convened a "War Council" in Flint Michigan, whose purpose was to launch a military front inside the United States with the purpose of helping Third World [Maoist-communist] revolutionaries conquer and destroy it.

Taking charge of the podium, dressed in high-heeled boots and a leather mini-skirt  her signature uniform  Dorhn incited the assembled radicals to join the war against "Amerikkka" and create chaos and destruction in the "belly of the beast."

Her voice rising to a fevered pitch, Dohrn raised three fingers in a "fork salute" to mass murderer Charles Manson whom she proposed as a symbol to her troops. Referring to the helpless victims of the Manson Family as the "Tate Eight" (the most famous was actress Sharon Tate) Dohrn shouted:

"Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victims stomach! Wild!"

(big snip)

Today William Ayers is not merely an author favored by the New York Times, but a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Anyone recall Rev Jeremiah Wright telling Hannity in the H&C interview he did last year that he (Hannity) needed to understand "Liberation Theology" in order to understand where he and his church were coming from? Hannity of course, like most of us, didn't have a clue what it was. Well I just looked it up, and all I can say is, I told you it wasn't really about religion and race! lol.

Liberation Theology From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Among the several essays published on liberation theology in the 1970s, one of the most famous is by the Peruvian Catholic priest, Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P. In his 1972 book, A Theology of Liberation, he theorized a combination of Marxism and the social-Catholic teachings contributing to a socialist current in the Church that was influenced by the Catholic Worker Movement and the French Christian youth worker organization, 'Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne.' It was also influenced by Paul Gauthier's 'The Poor, Jesus and the Church' (1965).

"CELAM as such never supported liberation theology which was frowned on by the Vatican, with Pope Paul VI trying to slow the movement after the 1962-1965 Council. Cardinal Samore, in charge of relations between the Roman Curia and the CELAM as the leader of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, was ordered to put a stop to this orientation which was judged antithetical to the Catholic Church's global teachings"--wikipedia:Liberation_theology

LAST ONE!...

The 1981 Weather Underground/Black Liberation Army Brinks robbery:

"David J. Gilbert, 37, rented the vehicle that same day in the Bronx. Gilbert was a long time member of the Weather Underground and a fugitive from the state of Colorado where he faced charges of assault and possession of explosives. The passenger in the front seat of the U Haul was Kathy Boudin, on the run from the law since the townhouse explosion in 1970. The couple had dropped off their one-year old child with a babysitter in the morning and was waiting for the return of the red van."

"In the back of the red van were Cecilio 'Chui' Ferguson, 35, Samuel Brown AKA Solomon Bouines, 41, Samuel Smith AKA Mtayari Sundiata, 37, and Donald Weems AKA Kuwasi Balagoon, 35. There were others present, but it has never been proven who, or how many. All the men in back of the van were members of a group they called 'The Family.' Most of them had ties to the Black Panthers or the Black Liberation Army, radical political groups that had many violent confrontations with police during the 1970s."

"At approximately 3:55 p.m., Paige, a 24-year Brink's veteran and his partner, Joe Trombino, 48, exited the doors to the Mall rolling out the moneybags on a hand truck. They walked over to the Brink's truck and began to load up the bags onto the rear deck. Simultaneously, the red van pulled up and the rear doors swung open. One of the suspects, armed with a shotgun, ran to the front of the truck and immediately fired two blasts directly at the bulletproof windshield. The guard in the front seat ducked just in time and was unhurt.

Another suspect, wearing a ski mask, opened up with his M-16 automatic rifle before his feet even hit the pavement, striking Paige in the neck, arm and chest. He was killed instantly.

Joe Trombino fired just one shot before he was hit several times in his upper arm and shoulder. The bullets all but severed his arm off his shoulder. "I've got no arm!" he screamed. But Trombino would survive that day, only to perish years later in another terrorist attack at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001."

If the doors on the Whitehouse open to allow Obama in , he will be welcoming in the garbage he calls friends. This is unfathomable, that we have come this close to allowing home grown terrorist groups into the Whitehouse and control of our nation. IS ANYONE LISTENING OUT THERE!

I'm listening, and I am appalled. Check out this photo for fellow traveller at another "panel" -- Sara Jane Olson (aka Kathleen Soliah).

Sara Jane Olson and former fugitive Bernadine Dohrn chatted before Dohrn was to lead a panel discussion about conspiracy prosecutions of political activits in 2000.

Olson (former Symbionese Liberation Front captor of Patty Hearst) has been sent back to prison for her role in a murder committed during a bank robbery, but Dorhn and Ayers never had to serve a day in prison for their deeds in the Weather Underground, thanks to bleeding heart judges who threw the case out of court on a technicality.

I'm sure that they'll all be honored guests at the first State Dinner in an Obama White House.

They are terrorist killers and were NEVER tried or convicted. They bombed a police station in New York City, Bombed the Capital building, Bombed the Pentagon and were planning a large bomb in a building in Fort Dix to kill hundreds of soldiers and their families, the bomb went off early and kill three of their Nazi team. They robbed and killed and then went to school on the tax payers money and are now university professors in Illinois and the Killer Bitch is on the board of the ABA and UCLA and a law professor.

5
posted on 03/30/2008 10:45:54 AM PDT
by YOUGOTIT
(The Greatest Threat to our Security is the US Senate)

It’s truly amazing that one of the two major parties in America has been so taken over by leftwing extremists that they’re going to nominate a virtual disciple of the Rev. Jim Jones school of politics for President.

7
posted on 03/30/2008 10:56:59 AM PDT
by Argus
(Obama: All turban and no goats.)

“After the death of his girlfriend, Ayers and his current wife, Bernardine Dohrn, spent the 1970s as fugitives running from the FBI. In 1980 the two surrendered, but all charges against them were dropped due to an “improper surveillance” technicality.”

Bernardine Dohrn did serve time becasue she would not testify against one of their Nazi members who help them rob a bank.

11
posted on 03/30/2008 2:10:43 PM PDT
by YOUGOTIT
(The Greatest Threat to our Security is the US Senate)

Another major fundraiser for Obama is William Ayers, who also sat on the board of the Woods Fund with Obama and is a professor at the University of Chicago.

Bill Ayers, along with his wife Bernadine Dohrn, was an active member of the Weather Underground, a radical left-wing group that advocated violence against the United State. Both Ayers and Dohrn went "underground" in 1970 after others in the group accidentally detonated a bomb in a Greenwich Village (New York City) townhouse. The blast killed three of the group's members including Ayers' girlfriend at the time.

While Ayers and Dohrn were hiding from law enforcement, the Weather Underground participated in the bombings of the US Capital, the Pentagon and a State Department building. In 1981 Ayers and Dohrn turned themselves in to federal authorities, but all charges were dropped as a result of alleged "government legal misconduct." In his 2001 memoir, Ayers wrote, "I don't regret setting the bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

Ayers and Dohrn are known to have held at least one fundraiser for Barack Obama in their Chicago home.

16
posted on 03/30/2008 3:23:23 PM PDT
by Kozak
(Anti Shahada: There is no god named Allah, and Muhammed is a false prophet)

Mideast Parley Takes Ugly Turn At Columbia U.
New York Sun, The (NY) - February 4, 2005
Author: SOL STERN and FRED SIEGEL Special to the SunSol Stern is writing “Israel without Apology” for Encounter Books. Fred Siegel is the author of the forthcoming “Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life,” also from Encounter Books.
You might think that Columbia University would be on its best academic behavior on the issue of the Middle East conflict these days. After all, several professors in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, known as MEALAC, are credibly accused of anti-Semitism and intimidating pro-Israel students. The university’s president, Lee Bollinger, has appointed a committee to look into the charges. But even with the media spotlight on, Columbia apparently can’t help itself.

Last Monday night we attended a university panel on the Middle East conflict titled “One State or Two? Alternative Proposals for Middle East Peace.” Even the panel’s title was a giveaway that we were in for more anti-Israel bias on campus. The “one state” solution is a euphemism for the destruction of the Jewish state - a trope of the most extreme rejectionist elements within the Palestinian movement and their allies in Syria and Iran. Terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah want to create an Islamic Republic in place of Israel. A few splinter Marxist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, founded by George Habash, offer the Jews a solution that’s far more “progressive.” They murder innocents merely to replace Israel with a “secular democratic” Palestine.

The scene at Columbia, with Spartacists handing out literature outside the packed auditorium and proponents of Palestinian military victory in the vast majority, was wildly at odds with the hopeful development on the ground, where Messrs. Sharon and Abbas are now scheduled to meet. One of the panelists was Mark Cohen, a Princeton historian of medieval Islam. He gave a measured scholarly presentation on the subject of Arab Muslim anti-Semitism, insisting that attacks on Jews in the Koran had little to do with hostility to Jews. It’s a debatable proposition. But professor Cohen never even engaged the issue at hand. He largely served as a prop for the ranting to follow.

Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia professor whose recent book argues that Yasser Arafat was right to reject the best peace deal he had ever been offered, opening the way to four years of bloodshed, presented a tendentious argument for a one-state solution that strained to stay within the bounds of reasoned discourse.

Then Joseph Massad took the floor, and the floodgates of hatred opened wide. Mr. Massad is one of the MEALAC professors accused of demanding of one Israeli student, “How many Palestinians did you kill today?” At the forum, he used the phrase “racist Israeli state” more than two dozen times. He used seemingly universalist language of anti-racism to drive a fascist argument. Mr. Massad is so extreme that he argued that Arafat was in effect an Israeli collaborator for even talking about compromise.

Whatever can be said of this rant, its “academic” content was hard to discern. But to judge by the applause he received, Mr. Massad was the star of the evening. Obviously, Mr. Massad, an acolyte of the dear departed George Habash, isn’t worried about President Bollinger’s panel, which includes three professors who have signed petitions demanding that all universities divest from Israel.

The final act of hatred came from the Israeli quisling “historian” Ilan Pappe, who has stated openly that his so-called scholarly work is an attempt to create a counter narrative to official Zionist historiography and to undermine the international legitimacy of the state of Israel. He bizarrely insisted that the destruction of Israel would pave the way for enhanced rights for women, and the feminist students in the audience cheered.

Instead of providing an alternative to hatred and extremism from both sides, this panel was a hate-fest masquerading as academic discourse. And this was no aberration attributable only to one misguided student group. In addition to Qanun, a Columbia Law School student group, the panel was cosponsored by the university chaplain, the Student Senate, and two of Columbia’s most prestigious academic affiliates: the Middle East Institute, headed by professor Khalidi, and the School of International and Public Affairs. SIPA’s dean, Lisa Anderson, was appointed by Mr. Bollinger to the committee looking into the charges against professor Massad - whose dissertation adviser she was.

Coming away from Monday night’s hate panel and then looking at this tangled web of conflicts of interest within the university, we realized that the issue of misconduct in the classroom by one or two professors, important though it is, is dwarfed by a more fundamental question: How did a great institution of higher learning allow itself to be transformed into a platform for vicious political propaganda and hate speech directed against one country, Israel?

Surely one crucial moment in this transformation was Columbia’s decision to raise $4 million - including a contribution from the United Arab Emirates - to create the Edward Said endowed chair in Arab studies, and then to give the prize to professor Khalidi. We don’t doubt that Mr. Khalidi has academic credentials. Compared to professors Massad and Pappe, he is a model of decorum and moderation. But when Columbia academic officials made this choice they knew they were getting a Palestinian political activist. From 1976 to 1982, Mr. Khalidi was a director in Beirut of the official Palestinian press agency, WAFA. Later he served on the PLO “guidance committee” at the Madrid peace conference.

In bringing professor Khalidi to Morningside Heights from the University of Chicago, Columbia also got itself a twofer of Palestinian activism and advocacy. Mr. Khalidi’s wife, Mona, who also served in Beirut as chief editor of the English section of the WAFA press agency, was hired as dean of foreign students at Columbia’s SIPA, working under Dean Anderson. In Chicago, the Khalidis founded the Arab American Action Network, and Mona Khalidi served as its president. A big farewell dinner was held in their honor by AAAN with a commemorative book filled with testimonials from their friends and political allies. These included the left wing anti-war group Not In My Name, the Electronic Intifada, and the ex-Weatherman domestic terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers . (There were also testimonials from then-state Senator Barack Obama and the mayor of Chicago.)

The message sent by Columbia University officials by this choice was that they were determined to honor the memory of Edward Said by continuing to have radical Palestinian activism on campus. That’s what they now have in spades. The question is whether it’s now possible within the university’s public space to even make an argument for the only democratic country in the Middle East.

A radical idea: Documenting insurrection
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - September 7, 2003
Author: Steven Rea
“Revolution really was in the air,” says Bernardine Dohrn , the ‘60s radical who, along with a gang of her Weathermen cohorts, can be seen - in archival footage and new talking-head interviews - in The Weather Underground.

Dohrn , whose photogenic fashion sense (miniskirts, Jackie-O shades) made her one of the most visible members of the radical movement that sprang up on campuses during the Vietnam War, is captured at a 1969 news conference at the outset of Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s documentary, which opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse.

“There’s no way to be committed to nonviolence in the middle of the most violent society that history has ever created,” the young Dohrn , fresh out of law school, says, defending a philosophy that amounted to a declaration of war against the U.S. government, and ultimately forced her and her partners into years of hiding.

Dohrn and other leaders of the Weathermen, an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, went on the FBI’s most-wanted list, and continued to orchestrate the bombings of government and corporate targets. When a person was killed in one of its early attacks, the group declared it “a terrible error,” and tried to avert injuries in a series of later bombings, including one at the Capitol in Washington. But a Greenwich Village townhouse the Weathermen used was destroyed in an accidental explosion that killed three bombmakers.

“I think for a lot of people, it is a revelation to see what was going on,” Dohrn said on the phone from Northern California recently. “We’re taught a very pabulum version of radical history. Even Malcolm X gets domesticated. Certainly Martin Luther King gets domesticated in a way that is both kind of wonderful that he’s recognized, and really excruciating because the heart of what was so innovative about him is cut out of it. . . . Anybody who worked with him, of course, knows about the torment and the crises and the making it up as he went along, and just the tremendous pressure brought to bear on him to stop.

“So, taking peeks at history is always subversive and always shocking.”

The Weather Underground is a pretty intriguing “peek.” Although filmmakers Green and Siegel, both in their 30s, don’t ask all the hard questions they could have, their film does capture a moment, and a movement, in stark contrast to the times today.

“I’m not sure what we have to tell young people today, by the way,” says Dohrn , 61, a law professor at Northwestern University. “But I think just the discovery of history is itself an exciting thing.”

Through interviews with Dohrn , husband Bill Ayers , Naomi Jaffe, Mark Rudd, David Gilbert (serving a life sentence for a 1981 Brink’s armored-car robbery gone fatally awry), Brian Flanagan, and SDS cofounder Todd Gitlin, the film chronicles a time of heady idealism and insurgency. It also shows how these mostly white, upper-middle-class kids tried, often with awkward zeal, to ally themselves with militants such as the Black Panthers . (The Brink’s job, which involved the recently paroled Kathy Boudin, is barely mentioned in the movie.)

(snip)

//

2 RADICALS GET TERMS IN SLAY-THEFTS
Philadelphia Daily News (PA) - February 15, 1984
Author: United Press International
A judge today sentenced former Black Panther SekouOdinga and revolutionary Silvia Baraldini to 40 years each for conspiracy and racketeering amid a bedlam of chants from black separatist supporters.

Twenty minutes later, in a separate sentencing, Baraldini echoed the same sentiments.

Odinga and Baraldini were the first of four defendants sentenced today - six months after convictions in the federal trial resulting from a series of armed robberies, including the $1.6 million Brink’s heist in which two policemen and a guard were killed.

Former Weather Underground leader Kathy Boudin and ex-convict Samuel Brown face similar charges in a state trial in White Plains, N.Y. Jury selection continued today in that case.

For the federal sentencings today, 30 spectators jammed into the tiny courtroom in Manhattan to chant support for Odinga , 39, and Baraldini, 35.

Members of the audience waved the green, black and red flags of the radical Republic of New Afrika, a group that seeks to annex five southern U.S. states for the creation of an independent black nation.

They repeatedly shouted “Free the Land” - the slogan of the RNA. At his sentencing, Odinga , dressed in a white Afrikan shirt and hat and green pants, called back “Free the Land.”

Odinga , who represented himself at the sentencing, in a statement painted the U.S. government and Duffy as “racist” and “fascist.”

Duffy, who had been silent until then, immediately imposed the maximum sentence on Odinga . He sentenced him to 40 years on the conspiracy and racketeering charges, and added a $50,000 fine.

“I will recommend he not be considered for parole,” Duffy said, as the audience hissed.

At her sentencing, in which she also received 40 years and a $50,000 fine, Baraldini derided Duffy for his “abuse of petty power” and the government for using “traitors” as prosecution witnesses.

I thought he did. Guess I mixed him up with some other terrorist bomb maker from the 60’s. That he got away with his crimes makes the whole thing that much more disgusting. But if he had been in jail Clinton would have pardoned him anyway. That’s some choice they’ve got in the Democratic Party.

20
posted on 03/30/2008 4:21:49 PM PDT
by Argus
(Obama: All turban and no goats.)

Dorhn was tried and convicted and erved time and paid a fine. her convicted felony status prevented her from being able to sit for the Bar Exam in any state. therefore, she had to work as a paralegal once she finished law school. She weasled her way into a law professsorship at Univ of Illinois at Chicago, but she cannot “practice” law.

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